Deepsix

by Jack McDevitt

Series:

Engines of God #2

Publisher:

Eos

Copyright:

September 2000

Printing:

January 2002

ISBN:

0-06-102006-0

Format:

Mass market

Pages:

508

This is the second book of the Academy series, following
The Engines of God and also featuring
the pilot Hutch as a main character. It can be read by itself, though;
the events of the previous book have very little impact on the story. But
be aware that Deepsix will spoil the conclusion of The
Engines of God.

Deepsix follows the now-familiar pattern of McDevitt novels: an
interplanetary exploration mission finds archeological remnants, this time
of an unexpected alien civilization. The exploration goes wrong,
resulting in a tense mix of survival in an alien environment and attempts
to figure out what the explorers are looking at and what it means.

This time, the backdrop is the collision of a gas giant with an Earth-like
world. The Earth-like world has been locked in an ice age for a few
thousand years because its star system has entered a nebula, which reduces
the light from its sun enough to drop the planetary temperature. The
initial exploration mission ended in disaster when some of the team were
killed by native wildlife. Since then the world had gone unexplored. But
when the scientific teams show up to watch the imminent collision, they
find remnants of an alien civilization that had been missed by earlier
scans. Hutch is diverted three weeks before the collision to land and
attempt to gather as much information as possible. From there, you can
probably write the general direction of the plot by picking the
predictable events that would lead to the most drama.

As is often the case with a McDevitt book, I was left wishing for a bit
more detail and twists to the exploration. I like his plots the best when
they're mysteries and puzzles, when the characters are piecing together
evidence to reconstruct stories and lost time. There's some of that here,
but the focus is on interpersonal drama, slow-developing characterization,
and planetary survival. Most of the last, at first at least, is hostile
non-sentient aliens, which I find a bit boring. There are only so many
variations in which SF authors present dangerous creatures, mostly by
combining various Earth-style monsters with eerie sorts of intelligence,
and I feel like I've read most of it before. The planetary survival part
gets much more interesting when the characters are facing dramatic natural
disasters rather than the local wildlife.

Characterization is clearly intended to be the heart of the story, though,
and here I appreciated what McDevitt was doing even if I didn't always
enjoy it. He assembles a cast of flawed, very human characters, often
with traits that make the reader initially dislike them, and then throws
events at them that slowly reveal more sides to their personalities. One
of those characters is a egotistical, self-righteous editor, social
commentator, and famous debunker of religion who's clearly partially
modeled after H.L. Mencken. He's both despicable and horribly
self-serving at the start of the story, but by the end of Deepsix
he's managed to find some personal depth and win some respect from the
other characters. This is one of those books in which one never gets to
shake the characters with no sense of personal responsibility the way that
they deserve, but instead is dragged into slowly finding admirable traits
in them. It's realistic, but it also feels a bit like being made to eat
your vegetables.

I respect what I think McDevitt is trying to do, which is take the sort of
scenario that might be used in an SF disaster novel and populate it with
normal, flawed characters, mostly avoid heroes, show people reacting to
the best of their abilities (often limited), and still show the emergent
energy and capabilities of basically decent people in an emergency.
McDevitt knows how to portray esprit de corps and bonds formed
between small groups of people in an emergency situation, and despite
having guessed nearly every plot twist throughout the book, I found the
ending and epilogue surprisingly affecting. Deepsix is too long,
and one has to put up with annoying people for a long time to get there,
but it reaches a satisfying conclusion.

I prefer McDevitt's social and technological puzzles, and this is instead
an engineer-with-a-wrench story with an unusual amount of
characterization. There's a lot of hard science solving problems that
were obviously telegraphed; parts of the story feel like throwbacks to an
earlier age of SF with improvisational scientists and engineers solving
urgent physics problems. The result is okay, certainly readable, and not
without its merits, but not really a book to seek out.

Despite being part of the Academy series, about the only point of
continuity is the general universe background and the appearance of Hutch.
Readers who want further development of the revelations of The
Engines of God will have to wait for the next installment.